See-through windows —

Windows 10 Start menu turns transparent in new leaked build

One of a few tiny changes that have been made recently.

Prolific Russian leaker WZor has published pictures of the newest Windows 10 version to leak (so far), build 10031.

Many of the recently leaked Windows 10 builds are notable not for the changes they show but the opposite. Microsoft announced earlier this week that the next public build of Windows 10 would include Project Spartan (although we're told that the announcement was a slip-up and that the company hadn't planned on confirming this), but most recent leaks still don't include a version of Microsoft's new browser. This is a little surprising if the browser is going to ship any time soon.

However, small changes are there if you look. In build 10031, the Start menu has gained a degree of transparency. Windows 10 for phones also includes transparency on its Start menu, though the implementation is slightly different there—on the phone, it's the tiles that are translucent. In Windows 10, it looks like it's only the background to the Start menu that's translucent.

Going further back, build 10022 moved the new virtual desktop button from the middle of the screen to the right-hand side.

With the current Windows 10 preview still feeling very unfinished, particularly in areas such as the new settings app, the small scale of these changes is a little surprising.

One possible explanation is simply that larger changes are being made on different branches. Pictures of a build that does include Project Spartan have leaked to another Russian site. It shows a browser that still needs a lot of work; features such as favorites, history, and the download manager apparently don't work, there are no integrated developer tools, and while the new browser is widely expected to have an extension system, none is apparent so far.